The material in this collection represents the accumulation of films
used in the presentation of Channel 11 news shows for the period 1960-1975. A
minor part of the collection consists of feature material as opposed to general
news. In total, the collection contains over 13,000 individual items.

The subject matter focuses mainly on news events in the Channel 11
viewing area, roughly a 100-mile radius centered around Houston. To a lesser
extent there is coverage of state and national news. The vast majority of the
coverage was filmed within the city of Houston.

The news mix broadly includes crime, disasters, politics, government,
and other community activities. Weather and sports are included to the extent
that they are a part of a story which justified on-the-spot coverage by a film
crew and reporter. The daily studio reporting of weather and sports is not
included.

Individual news stories range in length from about 30 seconds to
several minutes. Feature material on human-interest subjects is generally
longer. Several specials of a documentary nature are over an hour in
length.

Although the collection is extensive, the prospective user needs to
understand that it is incomplete in several respects. There are gaps in the
dates for which stories are available, which interrupt the comprehensiveness of
daily coverage. Days, weeks, and even entire months are sometimes skipped. The
early years of the 1960's are very sketchy, and the year 1973 is almost totally
absent.

Another form of incompleteness exists in the lack of the remarks to a
news item supplied by the anchor person in the traditional format of a
television news show. Neither the sound track or the film visual contain
on-camera anchor material. Also missing is the anchor voice-over that describes
action while the viewer watches a segment of previously recorded film.

What remains is a series of film clips literally spliced together
end-to-end without the benefit of the transitional commentary supplied by the
anchor. This eliminates introductory summaries as well as entire news stories
narrated live by the anchor during a broadcast.

The physical condition of the films range from excellent to very
poor.

The film reels in the collection are each stored in individual boxes.
Each box has a number; in most cases, the first 2 digits of the box number
indicate the year the film it contains was created, and the second two digits
indicate the sequence the box is in for that year. Thus, box 6703 is the third
box containing material from 1967. Within each box, each reel is numbered.
Individual film clips are spliced together on each reel. Whenever possible, the
date the the clips aired is included; sometimes, only partial dates are given.
In a few cases, no date is available. The titles that have been assigned to
each film clip were created by people working at KHOU-TV, probably the camera
operators or editors. In many cases, they are not very descriptive of what is
actually on the film, and actually tell more about the biases of those working
at the station.

In some places, the titles of the films, or portions of the titles,
were illegible to the processors. This is noted in the finding aid by the
presence of brackets []. In some places, the processors were not sure of what
the words were, but attempted to interpret them; in these cases, the words they
tried to decipher are in brackets. In other cases, a question mark appears
within brackets following parts of a title, indicating that they were not sure
of what the title actually was.

Arrangement Note

The films are arranged in general chronological order, though not
necessarily at the item level. Materials within a specific year will, for the
most part, be found with material from that same year. However, within
individual years, the material will not be in completely chronological order.
Thus, material dated September 1968 may be found after some material dated
October 1968, and so forth. For the researcher, this means that one should
always search the finding aid before and after a particular date, if they are
looking for material related to a specific date, as other materials related to
that date may be found at other locations. When using this
finding aid, researchers should look through all of the material from a
particular year if they are searching for items by date, as they may have been
filed with any of the other items from that year.

The material has been placed into artificial series as an aid to
researchers wishing to find the approximate locations of film. The series have
no significance other than that.

The titles to the films were created by staff at KHOU-TV, most likely
the camera operators or the editors working at the station. The titles were not
intended to provide long-term access to the film; this is a reflection of the
news business, in which the focus is on constantly finding new news stories,
while old clips were stored and generally forgotten about. Thus, the titles may
or may not accurately reflect what is actually on the film.

Occasionally, the titles given to film clips have a flippant or
disrespectful tone. While staff at the station were very professional in how
they persented the news to the public, their internal documents at times
reflect a different, irreverent attitude on their part. Thus, for example, a
story about Houston Mayor Fred Hofheinz was titled "Mayor Fred", while another
film was given the title "D.O.A. Bullshit Film".

Another dimension of the collection is apparent through the use of
offensive language in some of the titles; specifically, racial and ethnic slurs
and derogatory terms for certain groups of people were occasionally used in the
titles. While only a tiny fraction of the film titles in the collection
actually have such language (8 titles out of approximately 14,000 in the
collection have been found to contain derogatory language), this is reflection
of the makeup of the staff of the news department at the time the films were
made.

When viewed in isolation within the body of the finding aid, without
any sort of explanatory note, patrons could find such language distracting. In
light of this, HMRC staff changed the titles of this small handful of films to
prevent any misunderstandings. So as not to lose this dimension to the
collection, however, the original titles of the films are listed here: